New York Awards Coinsource Bitcoin ATM Company With First-Ever BitLicense

Coinsource, a Bitcoin teller machine (BTM) operator, has just received a license to operate in the New York State by the Department of Financial Services of the region. The company will be the 12th company to receive the license.

The so-called BitLicense was awarded to the company today, November 1, as Arnold Spencer, a manager from the company, noted that this was the first time that a Bitcoin ATM company received the license. At the moment, the company already has 40 BTMs in the state and has been using only provisional licenses.

Maria Vullo, a superintendent for the NYDFS, has confirmed that the license will be a new step to implement a strong regulatory safeguard and to control the risks involved in the business while encouraging innovation.

According to the company, the process was very long and it started in 2015. The company was first only able to get temporary licenses to work in the state, which is notoriously hard to get a license for, but things worked out very well at the end.

During the evaluation period, Coinsource went from being a firm that was unaudited and employed only a handful of people to a company with more than 20 employees and 200 machines, meaning that it has made a lot of progress over time.

According to Spencer, the company was able to have a growth of 500% in three consecutive years in terms of how many machines they had. The BTMs of the company are also important for people who do not want to use traditional exchanges because they offer direct P2P transactions that most of the centralized crypto exchanges do not provide for their clients at all and do it all in real time.

The company makes Know Your Customer (KYC) checks and only needs a driver’s license, a selfie and a cell phone number because this would make the process faster and easier for people to start using the services. The company believes that this could also be very useful for unbanked individuals that want access to cryptocurrencies, as Spencer affirmed because they do not need a bank account to use the system.

The Future After The License

At the moment, Bitcoin (BTC) is the only asset that can be bought or sold in these machines. Unfortunately, they also cannot be used to send funds to other wallets for the moment. The main reason for this issue, Spencer affirms, is that by doing this, you do not need a license to operate in more than one state, which makes the service easier to use.

However, as the company already has licenses in 18 states and got licenses pending in another 15, there is the goal of reaching all the 50 states and then the services could definitely be improved without the chance of any legislative trouble.

The company is also looking to establish operations in other countries like Japan, South Africa and Puerto Rico but there is no timeframe for when this will actually happen. However, it looks like Puerto Rico might come before than the other countries.

Spencer affirmed that the company is already having talks with Japan and the Asian market, but they are still discussing while implementing the system in South Africa is still far away. Other targets of the company include countries in South America, specially Argentina, which has a problem with inflation and it is using Bitcoin to solve it.